Helen Molesworth

Helen Anne Molesworth (born 1966, Chickasaw, Alabama) is an American curator of contemporary art based in Los Angeles.

As head of the Department of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Harvard University Art Museums, she presented an exhibition of photographs by Moyra Davey and ACT UP NY: Activism, Art, and the AIDS Crisis 1987–1993.

In 1997, she earned a Ph.D. in Art History from Cornell University.

While Curator of Contemporary Art at the Baltimore Museum of Art from 2000 to 2002, she arranged Work Ethic, which traced the problem of artistic labor in post-1960s art.

From 2002 to 2007 she was the Chief Curator of Exhibitions at the Wexner Center for the Arts where she organized the first U.S. retrospectives of Louise Lawler and Luc Tuymans, as well as Part Object Part Sculpture, which examined the influence of Marcel Duchamp's erotic objects.

On August 13, 2006 Molesworth married her wife, art historian, Susan Dackerman in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

From 2010 to 2014 Molesworth was the Barbara Lee Chief Curator at the Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA) Boston, where she assembled one person exhibitions of artists Steve Locke, Catherine Opie, Josiah McElheny, and Amy Sillman, and the group exhibitions Leap Before You Look: Black Mountain College 1933–1957, Dance/Draw, and This Will Have Been: Art, Love & Politics in the 1980s.

The recipient of the Bard Center for Curatorial Studies’s 2011 Audrey Irmas Award for Curatorial Excellence, she is currently at work on a book about "what art does."

Molesworth was a jury member for the College Art Association’s Distinguished Artist Award for Lifetime Achievement (2012), The New School’s Vera List Prize for Art and Politics (2014), the Prix Canson (2016), the Suzanne Deal Booth / FLAG Art Foundation Prize (2018), and the PinchukArtCentre’s Future Generation Art Prize (2018).

From 2014 to 2018, she was the Chief Curator at The Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) in Los Angeles.

Raised in Flushing, Queens, and Forest Hills, Queens, by a textile artist mother, who worked in the men's wear industry, and an English professor father, who taught at Queens College, Molesworth graduated from Stuyvesant High School.

After graduating from the State University of New York at Albany, Molesworth entered the Whitney Museum’s Independent Study Program.

Molesworth was the Chief Curator at The Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA), Los Angeles, 2014–2018.

After her arrival in Los Angeles in 2014 she reinstalled MOCA's permanent collection galleries, co-organized a survey exhibition of Kerry James Marshall that traveled to Chicago, New York, and Los Angeles, organized Anna Maria Maiolino’s first US retrospective, and forged a partnership between MOCA and The Underground Museum.

In 2016, she was a member of the jury which selected Njideka Akunyili Crosby as recipient of the Prix Canson.

Her final exhibition at MOCA was a 2018 exhibition One Day at a Time: Manny Farber and Termite Art, which traced the legacy of Farber's "termite art" ideology on a wide range of contemporary artists, including many from Molesworth's own curatorial history.

In March 2018, Molesworth was abruptly fired from MOCA, due to what the museum called "creative differences."

Catherine Opie, a MOCA board member, reported that museum director Philippe Vergne had said he fired Molesworth for "undermining the museum."

Molesworth has long spoken publicly about the lack of diversity and equity in art institutions and the difficulties she has encountered in mounting exhibitions by non-male artists and artists of color—in a lecture to the UCLA Design Media Arts department on January 18, 2018, she said: “I don’t think there’s any way for MOCA to not be a white space.

Not gonna happen.

The DNA is too deep.

We don’t have anyone of color on our board.

Molesworth was the commencement speaker for the UCLA School of the Arts and Architecture in June 2018.

In 2022, she hosted the six-part podcast, Death of an Artist, about the death of Cuban-American artist Ana Mendieta, wife of Carl Andre; the series made several “best of 2022” lists, including those of The Economist and The Atlantic.

She has since interviewed artists and thinkers for David Zwirner Gallery's “Dialogues” podcast.

She also leads art conversations as the host of the gallery's video series “Program”.

Let’s start right there.” In a 2019 Cultured Magazine article by Sarah Thornton, Moleswoth said of the incident: “It was a total debacle."

Since 2019, Molesworth has been the "Curator in Residence" at the Anderson Ranch Arts Center in Colorado.

Molesworth has organized shows about the artists Noah Davis in 2020 and Ruth Asawa in 2021 at David Zwirner Gallery.

Also in 2021, she curated the exhibition "Feedback" at the Jack Shainman Gallery's The School space in Kinderhook, housed in a former high school.

The 21-artist show examined the history taught in American schools through the issues left insufficiently addressed in educational curricula, most notably race, and continues Molesworth's critique of institutional spaces and power structures.

Molesworth is the author of numerous catalogue essays and her writing has appeared in publications such as Artforum, Art Journal, Documents, and October.